It's very late, so I'm looking less for technical criticisms (awkward language/misspelling) since I know I'm vaguely incoherent now. I'm more interested in broad critique about theme, concept, etc.

The plan is to add a number of relevant documents, not so much to pad it out as to stretch my legs and make the abstract descriptions a little easier to grasp concisely. A lot of the description is still being edited out as I kill redundant language and extraneous details!

Anyway, no need to be gentle, all I ask for is suggestions I can use to improve it!

EDIT: Also a couple people have told me I shouldn't be using [REDACTED] unless I know what's behind it. For the record, I do, and it's integral to the backstory of the SCP as well as the reason for certain other unusual details in the file. Trust me, this is something the higher ups don't want any idiot researcher getting ideas about. Better for them to assume something horrible.

Big picture here, there’s not enough going on to grab my interest, or suggest that your additional documents are going to make this more interesting. The elements you have right now (lamp of darkness, beings that want to engage you, personality change) are a little creepy, but nowhere near bizarre enough to carry and SCP. Even if you’ve got some super interesting narrative twists or weirdness in the logs, what’s currently shown is taking up WAY, WAY too much space, and could be presented more effectively.

The chamber's ventilation system should be equipped to quickly disperse a standard suite of undetectable, lethal toxins.

SCP-LAMP is a significant cognitohazard. Despite intrinsic difficulties in studying and interviewing SCP-LAMP and its related instances indirectly, only D-class personnel will be used as primary subjects1, and any Foundation personnel who become primary subjects for any reason will be subject to containment and possible demotion to E-class.

Primary test subjects are not to be reintroduced into the standard D-class population and instead be isolated for observation and interview2. Should the object cease functioning unexpectedly during testing, the primary subject is to be immediately terminated and their remains destroyed. All testing should be limited to ten (10) minute exposures, unless test variations are cleared by the Site Director.

All of this should go, ESPECIALLY since this is a safe-class. Most important, containment procedures don’t exist to be comprehensive or realistic; they exist to serve the narrative, set tone, and meet some minimal level of plausibility. The way these paragraphs are written, they’re telling the reader that not only is this thing deadly and dangerous (which won’t make readers care), but that we should be taking this very seriously and crapping ourselves preemptively with just how scary it’s going to be. It is not a good idea to hype your SCP that much, and it puts more text between the reader and anything good.

Also, more on the above, being more deadly and dangerous does not equal more interesting, nor does being gorey. There’s plenty of dangerous things on the wiki, so it’s hard to wring horror out of that. Honestly, same goes with things that change your personality. I’m not saying you can’t use these elements, but they’ve got to be worked in to the narrative or concept of the thing, and go somewhere well-developed or interesting.

If you want to set up that this thing is deadly, fine, but get the procedures the hell out of the way and get on towards the story. We’re gonna want to see some human narratives or really strange mental imagery, get there fast.

Recovery…

Do NOT put the recovery before the Description. If we don’t have a general idea what you’re talking about, we won’t care about the recovery. The content of the recovery itself is ok. If it’s building up to something that you plan to reveal later, fine.

In testing it has shown to be highly resistant to damage or modification, requiring excessive amounts of force to simply open its casing for internal examination or replacement of the bulb3. Interior study of the object has indicated nothing unusual about its mechanics to explain its anomalous abilities. While unpowered or its bulb is missing/broken, it will exhibit no further anomalous abilities.

This whole paragraph can go. Things being unbreakable for no particular reason is a bad, outdated trope, and will cause people to downvote. (At best, it's lazy writing: You're answering the question "but what if it broke?" with "… um, it can't". It's not even a question that comes up.) The rest of this is telling us what we don’t know (waste of space) or is repeated in the next paragraph.

If SCP-LAMP-1 is currently unpopulated, the first human subject to enter will become the primary subject. They will find themselves at the center of an apparently limitless black void4. The only observable and constant feature is SCP-LAMP itself, which will seem to be suspended in space at the height it was activated. There is no other observable landmarks in this space, and all illumination is provided by SCP-LAMP. Only the primary subject seems to be able to safely end the effect, by physically approaching SCP-LAMP and switching it off. Secondary subjects may also end the effect this way, triggering the catatonia described below.

It is really boring reading about this kind of stuff in plain exposition. This is a case of show-don’t-tell: it would be much more engaging for the reader to find out this stuff as it’s happening to characters, in test logs. Plus that would get you into story mode sooner. You could still present a shorter version of this and give the more personal/first-person details in a log. (Also, narrative doesn't have to mean personal narratives or backstory. Even if you don't always show things through a character's eyes, the Foundation progressively learning about this stuff is a narrative.)

Edit: One other thought, the whole lamp in a dimension of darkness thing is some good dream logic/dream-imagery, and could hit decently hard, but for that to be effective, you've got to get it across early.

- - - - -
If you cut this down mercilessly and get back to your core elements (which you should do), you’ve still sort of got a thing-that-does-a-thing, and some elements that feel like they’re going to rely on old tropes to create horror. I don’t think that’s going to be enough. If you have something planned out for what’s going on behind this and will be revealed in the testing logs, or more about the beings or the family or things in the last section, you should share that in this thread and we’ll try to judge/advise on that basis. If not, or if that doesn’t turn out well, you might need to take this to Ideas and Brainstorming to get some additional imagery or twists.

I would also suggest reading more Series 3 or 4 SCPs, to get a feel for the level of strangeness or story that folks like nowadays.

Thanks Petro! You're not wrong. I spoke with Jazstar last night about my concept and it made me suddenly realize how many things I'm approaching from a very bad angle. I've been writing it too much for myself, and intend to tear down a lot of it. I realized I've been really copping out on how vague a lot of it is, even though internally I'm rationalizing it as giving myself freedom to write more in the future.

Tonight I plan to cut it way back to its bones and start building it back up. I want to keep the interactions with the two instances, but I think they could be redesigned to be more interesting and chilling on their own, and that the events happening inside the void space is less mundane.

I do want to develop the narrative of the family more and rewrite the final parts to have more impact. I feel like it's not being well conveyed that a third party got involved and somehow 'infected' the anomaly, implying that it's not behaving as it was intended to.

I'm still a little hesitant to blurt out my internal logic behind the way things are written now, mostly because I'm starting to worry it feels really stupid to anybody but me. Essentially the instances encountered are amalgamated beings — they have their own existences, but are imprinted by the psyche of the person entering the void space. If every thought, value, emotion and experience you have is the building blocks behind what makes you into what you are, then they can be seen sort of like loading a raw data file of 'you' into a text editor. What you're going to get is incomprehensible data, but you CAN affect it in a way you aren't supposed to, changing the hard code in this sloppy direct way that probably isn't going to leave you with a program that compiles. The logic of it is sort of subjective, based on the primary subject, and because I won't sit here pretending to be able to say "if you change this aspect of a person, they'll start behaving this way". It's more supposed to be the idea of it, that they can significantly change a person's worldview and internal universe, because as soon as you enter SCP-LAMP-1, they ARE you. They're also themselves, but they're also a little bit you, too. You can argue with yourself all you want, but at the end of the day, you are who you are. And if you change THEIR minds, you're changing YOUR mind, whether you meant to or not.

They don't represent specific 'mental aspects'. They're not id vs ego or anything like that. More like they are supposed to represent feelings and life aspects, possibly different ego states. I'm intentionally trying not to define their 'real nature' too much to myself, because I don't want to start limiting myself on the weirdness they might cause. But the crux of it is that SCP-LAMP is an internal dialogue, an epiphany, a world changing idea… on crack. It's your brain ruthlessly attacking itself in an effort to change, and distracting you with the pomp of a magical dark world while it does it. But at the same time, the instances aren't JUST representations of a person's mind. They do exist on their own, they do have their own worldviews/experiences, but they become muddled any time a primary subject suddenly forces their own 'self' to be superimposed over the instances'. And at least one of them has been externally affected even more.

Maybe part of the problem is that I have a 'feeling' of what they are but since I've been shy about describing them, I'm not good at putting it into words. Which is antithetical to writing obviously. xD

I'll definitely cut a lot of the technical description way down and drop more of the extraneous details. I want to go back to the -2 and -3 instances and try to make them more interesting on their own merit, because I don't want to go into the interview logs with characters nobody cares about.

As a courtesy to our readers on mobile devices, please collapse long posts. ~Zyn

Anyway, I much appreciate the feedback. Looking forward to getting back home so I can start making some of these changes!

Edit: And thanks Zyn, I'll keep that in mind in future discussions. :D

What I want to say is that what you're talking about in terms of vagueness or a lack of logic isn't a problem. It's absolutely acceptable to try to communicate a feeling or a general broad concept instead of spelling out something that's very clear. Hell, look at the whole Class of '76 milieu. And dream-logic can be just as good as real logic. So, don't ditch an idea on that basis.

There's a separate issue of vagueness in terms of giving the reader enough to work with to understand what's going on, which is something I struggled with in early drafts. I've often been so focused on weaving in subtle hints that I've forgotten entirely to tell a story readers can follow. Err on the side of telling them too much, and if it goes too far, that'll get caught in critique.

The biggest question then is how to get your idea across. The effect is such a personal thing, that I think a lot of testing logs or interviews or the like are going to be required for readers to start to understand. You'll need to think out what order you want to reveal things, both to the reader and to the Foundation. Maybe the Foundation is first just trying to define what the entities are, and then maybe they learn about the personality changes and think it provides real epiphany/insight and are attracted by that, but then they discover that it's nothing of the sort and it all goes to shit. (I'm not saying that's the best/correct order, just an example.) Also not saying that you need to plot this out with a full outline or screenplay, just keep in mind that you're doling out information and plot twists in an order you choose, and that matters.

If you think these beings should take on the character traits of the person walking into it, then what people are walking into the Zone? Maybe an MTF agent during recovery, D-Class, other agents or researchers, whoever, and you can show the entities taking on aspects of these people, even if the entities initially appear to the reader to just be versions of the archetype you gave in the description. Also, if you really want to show these thing's nature and how they take on the traits, you need to show them interacting with people.

I'm also not sure I have a perfect idea of what you mean above, but you can kind of adapt my advice to fit what story you're trying to get across.

I think you actually have a really good idea of what I'm trying to do, so the feedback is really helpful. I agree, I've gotten so obsessed with being subtle that I've kind of demanded the reader work to understand what's happening, which is no fun to read.

I'll cut out a lot of the technical description. I'm definitely more interested in logs and interviews, because you're right that that's where the real emotional impact of the SCP is going to appear. Thanks again for all the feedback!